6 animals starting with the letter O — each with origin, classification, and notes.
If you've been searching for animals that start with O, you'll find 6 detailed animals below. We're not interested in giving you only a list of names — every entry on this page links to a full profile with the kind of detail you'd actually want to know.
For animals, that means taxonomy, habitat, diet, range, lifespan, and conservation status.
An eight-limbed marine cephalopod with three hearts, blue blood, and an extraordinary intelligence — capable of solving puzzles, using tools, and changing color across its entire body in milliseconds despite being colorblind.
A secretive forest giraffe of the Congo Basin — the only living relative of the giraffe, despite looking more like a striped horse, and completely unknown to Western science until 1901.
The wild ass of Asia — a fast, slender-legged equid midway between a horse and a donkey, the onager is built for speed across open desert steppe; in short sprints it can reach 70 km/h, making it one of the fastest land animals; populations have been severely reduced by hunting and habitat loss across most of their historical range; the Indian wild ass subspecies survives mainly in the Little Rann of Kutch.
North America's only marsupial — a Virginia-opossum surviving and thriving across most of the continent, with a prehensile tail, 50 teeth, and the famous "playing dead" defense.
A large reddish-orange great ape of Southeast Asian rainforests — the only great ape outside Africa, exclusively arboreal, with deep cognitive abilities and a critical conservation crisis.
A marine mustelid that floats on its back and uses stones as tools to crack shellfish, with the densest fur of any mammal and a key role in kelp-forest ecology.
That's our current list of animals starting with the letter O. We add new entries every week — if you have a favorite animal starting with O that isn't on this page, let us know and we'll write it up.
Looking for more? Try animals that end with O, or contain O anywhere in the name.